Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Naturalist Collection, published by LoganStrohl on May 6, 2023 on LessWrong.

There’s a kind of rhythm to the four phases of naturalism. To me, they feel a bit like oscillation between zooming out and zooming in, or like inhaling and exhaling. The first phase (Locating Fulcrum Experiences) has a broad exploratory feel, like zooming out; it’s sort of meandering, touching on this and that until I’ve found the right thing to hone in on. The second phase (Getting Your Eyes On) emphasizes focused attention, and involves a lot of precision and detail. It’s more like zooming in.

This third phase, “Collection”, zooms out again. After mining a small number of experiences for all the detail you can perceive, the next step is to train yourself to notice every single instance of your fulcrum experience, no matter when, where, or how it happens.

You may find that the experiences you previously studied in detail represented a narrow subset of all the instances that happen; the modal instance might be far more subtle, might happen in a context you didn’t anticipate, or might be quite different in some other way. By the end of this phase, you’ll likely perceive some large patterns in the way this experience shows up in your life, and you’ll be very familiar with the circumstances that give rise to it.

How To Collect Experiences: Gamified Noticing

In the most basic version of collection, you’ll simply tap your leg (or make some other planned gesture) when you notice the experience you’re watching for. As you may recall from a previous essay, I call this “marking”. You don’t necessarily have to do anything special with your mind when you mark an experience; you can just endeavor to explicitly notice the experience every time (that is, to notice that you’ve noticed it).

But the standard version of collection, the one I do when I’m serious about a study, is a little bit gamified. Rather than just making a marking gesture, you’ll also keep a tally of how many times you noticed over the course of a day. Your goal each day is to beat your high score.

There are a few good ways to keep a noticing tally. One way to do it is just to count in your head, which apparently works fine for some people. Or you could get a little tally device such as a knitting counter, a golf counter, or a counter ring, and keep that with you. There are also phone apps that mimic golf and knitting counters. Personally, I typically use a tiny notebook these days and make literal tally marks with a pen, since I often like to jot down a few words as field notes anyway.

What I like most about the gamified version of collection is that the people who really get into it tend to find themselves steering toward situations where they’ll encounter their fulcrum experience. You might worry that steering toward fulcrum experiences would skew the data on how the experience shows up in daily life; and that’s true, it does. But I find that the more I notice something, the easier it becomes to notice in the future; and this effect has proven robust among people I’ve worked with. A person who gets a much higher tally in the first week or two of collection will be far better at catching all the uncontrived instances of their fulcrum experience in the third and fourth weeks. You can always stop using the tally once you’re very good at noticing the experience.

I think it’s well worth the tradeoff, so in addition to suggesting this incentive structure, I actively encourage people to design artificial situations where they’ll encounter their fulcrum a lot. (More on that, as well as other concerns with gamification, in “Troubleshooting” below.)

The Noticing Timeline

Tapping your leg when you notice an experience may sound simple enough; but in fact it usually takes people some time before they can consistently mark right as the experience i...